Tekken 6: Breaking my Theory

I used to have a theory about TEKKEN. Skip the even sequels - buy the odd ones. This can be seen on MetaCritic. They don't have the first game listed at all. As an arcade port, it suffered the growing pains of finding itself in a climate dominated by Sega's Virtua Fighter series and wasn't a widespread success. Thankfully sequels were made and here we are.

Game - Average Score
TEKKEN 1 - 7.5
TEKKEN 2 - 8.9
TEKKEN 3 - 9.6
TEKKEN 4 - 7.9
TEKKEN 5 - 8.8
TEKKEN 6 - 8.0

To further illustrate this point let us average the odd sequels against the even sequels. The odd TEKKENs (with the lackluster initial arcade port) have an average of 8.63. The even TEKKENs make out with a 8.26. It is with this theory that I decided to skip TEKKEN 6. Of course the day the game came out and I saw my friends playing, I buckled under the pressure and picked it up.

I am glad I did!


All 6 of the new fighters are great. They each add or compliment the fighting styles of other existing characters and give veterans to the series something shiny to look at. In addition to the standard Arcade, Versus, Team Battle, Ghost, and Online modes that have now become standards in the series; Namco has added Scenario Campaign. This ambiguous mode has players running around beating up generic baddies to unlock costume pieces that can be customized for each character. This mode has been tried before (dating back to the 4th game), but they finally found a great balance and any fan who skips this mode is truly missing out. The boss fights are still cheap as hell and the game can still turn frustrating fast with 10+ hit combos taking away 80% of your life bar, but the magic is still here.

It is just a pity that more people don't take the dive and get into this fighting series. TEKKEN will always remain one of my favorite franchises and Yoshimitsu will always be the man... or alien samurai... or whatever.

THEORY DEBUNKED